The heart of connection: How TELUS is using data to enrich customer experience, community, and life

Executives often speak about “how” they will leverage technology to solve problems. Topics like, the benefits of organizing a universal data lake, the power of serverless architecture, or the debate over virtual machines and Kubernetes containers often generate intense discussions.

Sometimes lost in these technical discussions is the “why” of technology. The core purpose of technology is to improve our lives by making time-consuming or complex tasks easier. With technology, previously complicated interactions between customer and company can be made much simpler and greatly enhance the service experience.

But with more technology comes more data, and managing that data responsibly while also realizing its potential, can be complicated. It’s often easy to forget that on the other end of every data point, there is a person trying to perform a task. They’re looking for information, contacting family or a colleague, or using an app to help get something done.

TELUS, the Canada-based communications technology company, has seen firsthand how data can simplify and enrich people’s lives and drive positive change – while always ensuring it is handled ethically and responsibly. 

“At TELUS, it’s really important for us to be good custodians of data,” Hesham Fahmy, TELUS' chief information officer, said in the latest edition of our Transformation Debrief series. “We treat data with the utmost respect because it isn’t ours to own. So while we see the opportunity to innovate with data, we always put privacy first.”

Google Cloud has been helping TELUS with its data and technology transformation for the past few years, and in 2021, they signed a 10-year strategic partnership. The two companies have joined forces to use data for good, delivering solutions to enhance worker safety, create a more sustainable future, confront the pandemic with data-driven insights, and build better customer service through cloud-optimized solutions at its global arm, TELUS International. 

“As we think about data, one of our first priorities is asking, ‘If all this data exists in our ecosystem, what are we doing to ensure the security, privacy, and sanctity of that data?’” Fahmy said . “Maintaining that trustworthiness takes up a lot of our mindshare right now — making sure we're getting it right, and that we're doing right by our customers.”

Organizing data for insights

Working with engineers from Google Cloud and Accenture, TELUS was able to streamline and organize its data ingestion process to enhance customer service. The project resulted in creating a data pipeline that provided a real-time perspective on customer intent and behavior.

“TELUS is very focused on being an insights-driven organization,” Fahmy said. “By contextually analyzing complex, de-identified data, we can extract powerful insights to help customize our products, services and experiences to truly delight our customers.”

The goal is to simplify how the customer interacts with the carrier. 

“Our mission is to deliver simplified, humanized digital experiences for our customers,” Fahmy said. “We need to consider how we can drive that simplification, what is creating complexity or the cognitive load, and if there’s a way we can infer these answers through data.”

With data pipelines updated and organized, TELUS is now applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to extract insights and better predict and react to customer needs. Fahmy said these AI tools have led the team to exciting new lines of inquiry: “What are some of the insights we need to glean? What are some of the cognitive problems that our customers think of?”

One solution that has helped TELUS understand its customers better is using the Google-powered CCAI Insights tool to automate the process of capturing, transcribing and analyzing customer interactions. 

By analyzing as many as 60,000 contact center calls daily, TELUS can accurately identify the true intentions and sentiments behind these customer interactions so team members can respond to queries faster, discover new opportunities for improvement, and ultimately, provide a superior, more personalized service experience. 

Faster, easier, and more engaging experiences

In today’s digital era, TELUS sees further opportunity in its cloud transformation to reinvent the customer experience. Cloud technology can help organizations accomplish tasks in mere minutes that would previously have taken days. 

In fact, organizations have to think and operate in a whole new way in order to unlock all that the cloud has to offer.

“The key is to use the cloud in the right way.” Fahmy said. “A lot of people using cloud just replicate what they did in the past or what they did in their data center. When you ground it in what you're trying to get, in outcomes, the cloud becomes a great enabler.”

The goal is to enrich every interaction a customer has with TELUS, regardless of channel, with digital technology to enable faster, easier, and more emotionally-engaging experiences.

“At the end of the day, it's all about simple human needs,” Fahmy said. “Customers are asking us for simplicity. To make their lives easier and create better outcomes. It’s about what we can do for them — whether that's providing reliable mobile internet communications, making their homes or businesses more secure, or supporting them with virtual health services — we want to reduce the cognitive load and enrich our customers' lives.